bottomed bateau, tied to the outermost piling, was already afloat. With a grunt of satisfaction the marshman lowered his light wiry body into the boat, leaned the gun against a thwart where he could reach it in an instant, picked up his heavy homemade oars and began the long row down the winding march creek which would bring him to the back beach of the barrier island between the marshes and the sea.
Another fisherman was astir early that morning, and another hunter. Ten minutes after Jen's bateau had vanished in the gloom, a great blue heron, standing hump-backed and motionless on a limb of a water oak a hundred yards from the landing, suddenly straightened his slim body, craned his sinuous neck and launched into the air on wide, slow-beating pinions. Almost at the same moment a large black lump at the top of a tall dead pine fifty yards beyond the heron's oak came suddenly to life and assumed the shape of a bulky, dark-bodied, white-headed bird—a male bald eagle.
The eagle's keen ears had caught the swish of the heron's wings and the faint sound had awakened him. He saw the shadowy form of the heron sweeping past, and having thus explained the slight noise which had disturbed him, he lost all interest in the matter, and after stretching first one wing and then the other, set about preening his feathers
